The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

164 / the world peace diet
against women and against rival herders and nations. This systematic
cruelty and the repressed but healthy sense of compunction that naturally
goes with it are the source of our cultural belief that people are
inherently evil. The deep-seated sense of guilt, fear, and anxiety arising
from this infects all of us unconsciously and causes us many problems,
physically, mentally, and spiritually. Because of this, we find there is
today a growing movement that urges freedom from guilt trips and
judgment. We recognize that chronic guilt cripples us, depletes our energy,
and keeps us trapped in old patterns, and we understandably want
to be free of it—but we don’t see that its source is in the ongoing cruelty
of our daily meals. Thoughts and behavior produce after their kind.
We can thus see how difficult it is to effectively address and reduce
the suffering caused to animals through vivisection, rodeos, circuses,
canned hunts, dog fighting rings, and so forth while as a culture we still
practice eating them. The desensitization inherent in reducing animals
for food naturally expands to animals mistreated in non-food uses as
well—but it doesn’t just stop there, at the boundary of animals. This is
why “man’s inhumanity to man” is rooted in our inhumanity to animals.
Conventional religion, like science, accurately reflects the psychological
trauma of the herding culture that birthed it and that still sustains
it. Everything is justified by the culture’s living mythology. As
Joseph Campbell points out in The Masks of God, cultures dependent
on animal flesh organize themselves around death because “the paramount
object of experience is the beast, [k]illed and slaughtered. . . .” 14
This is true of our culture today, and the deaths of the millions of animals
slaughtered daily ripple through all our religious institutions,
which provide the mythos to justify it now as they did in the arid hills
of the Mediterranean basin three thousand years ago.
Plant-based cultures, Campbell points out, organize themselves
around life. The plant world provides “the food, clothing and shelter of
people since time out of mind, but also our model of the wonder of
life—in its cycle of growth and decay, blossom and seed, wherein death
and life appear as transformations of a single, superordinated, indestructible
force.” 15 The revolution desperately needed today, if we are to
survive, is a transformation of the basic orientation of the herding cul-